


Sympathy For the Devil

by fluorescentgrey



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Character Study, Gen, Post-War, Werewolf Culture, some lavender/OFC
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-08-22
Updated: 2016-08-22
Packaged: 2018-08-10 07:02:15
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,522
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7834837
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fluorescentgrey/pseuds/fluorescentgrey
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"You won't do a single bad thing to anyone as long as you lock yourself up."</p>
            </blockquote>





	Sympathy For the Devil

**Author's Note:**

  * In response to a prompt by Anonymous in the [obscuro_2016](https://archiveofourown.org/collections/obscuro_2016) collection. 



She woke — woke. Couldn’t scream. Throat packed full of something dry and thick as cotton. The moon in the window ripped up through her skin and guts and as such she began impossibly in the throes of it to develop a real inkling. 

\--

“Who ever heard of a black girl werewolf,” said the guy at the Registry with a false and cloying joviality. She had owled Michael to see about his coming with her but he hadn't responded. Then she had owled Weasley, but he had sent flowers. 

She didn’t say anything. Could one call oneself necessarily a werewolf if one, though one knew one had the potential, and if one was presently infected, if one looked at one’s bite nightly in the mirror for at least an hour, if all this, but as of yet one’s first full moon, one’s coming out, one’s debutante performance, was still two weeks away? 

He took all her fingerprints and measured her weight and height. The color of her eyes. “You’ll need to come back after your first transformation,” he said, “to report on the color of your pelt.” 

He gave her a bit of what he called Interim Paperwork: _Lavender Brown, age eighteen, date of birth 6 April 1980, date of Bite 2 May 1998, bitten by: Fenrir Greyback (presumed)…_

\--

It was rather a shame, she thought, that Lupin was dead, though probably he didn’t think it quite a shame that he was dead, but after all he was the only werewolf (the only, said a little voice, the only _other_ werewolf) she had ever really talked to more than four seconds. She had a cigarette and an espresso at a cafe in the rain and from a bookstore’s outdoor rack she shoplifted a copy of _Wuthering Heights_. She didn’t remember the last time she’d been home. No doubt she had gotten owls. 

She went to a club, they were playing a Pylon song she liked which she heard from outside; she did a line of coke with strangers and fucked some guy in the bathroom. His neck was long and pretty with a freckle at the base of it like a spatter of chocolate. If I bite him, she wondered, in the middle of it, she knew she wouldn’t come, didn’t care, what will happen? 

The next night she went out again to a grunge club and went home with a girl and they listened to Babes in Toyland and fucked on the couch. She had roommates asleep in the next room. The girl pushed Lavender’s shirt up over her belly. “What happened?” she asked. 

“I’m a werewolf,” Lavender said. “I got bit earlier this month.” 

The girl’s skinny hand shifted between her legs. “What were you doing, that you got bit by a werewolf?” 

“Fighting, um, defending, you know, my school, from certain — _fuck_.” 

Afterward they had a joint. Outside perhaps it was dawn. The record had ended long ago but neither of them had bothered to get up to flip it. “You know why you never see girl werewolves, like, in any media,” asked the girl. 

“Why’s that?” 

“All women are already werewolves all the time. Our behavior is orchestrated by the whims of the moon. You know, once a month we lose all control and become bloodthirsty ravening hellbeasts.” 

\--

She slept in tube stations and on the stairs of libraries and in abandoned warehouses making pretty lights and fires with magic and shoplifting food and books and wondering and waiting and waiting and wondering and staring at the moon feeling it pull on her strings like a marionette, and longing, longing after nothing, longing after uncertainty, and once daily changing her bandages as they had taught her at St. Mungo’s, and eyedroppering dittany from a tiny vial into the deeper and sharper of the big scraping gouges. 

\--

She was so scared she went to the supervised transformation cells run by the Ministry on the Isle of Dogs. They had a little table set up with coffee and snacks and there were already fifteen or so people there talking and laughing with one another and their nostrils flared when they saw her. 

At the nurse’s table she signed in. “I’m new,” she said. “This is my first time.” 

“Your first time here?” 

“No, like, my first time, I mean, I was bitten on May the second.” 

She was poured a cup of coffee and her open hands were filled with biscuits and cheese wedges and she was sat down on one of the uncomfortable chairs and swarmed suddenly by a bunch of very thin and very tall yellow-eyed sorts wan about the faces and thinning of the hair, and their clothes were ragged, and many of them had shoved much of the free food into purses and satchels and pockets. 

“This has never happened to you before,” said an old woman. Or perhaps not old but she looked it. Checking to see if it were true. 

“Never.” 

“Who bit you?” 

“People said Greyback did. I was already, you know, I was unconscious.” 

“At Hogwarts, just this month?” 

She nodded. Someone said Lupin’s name. 

“It feels like the moon unzips you,” said the woman who looked old. “It’s really bad, like horrible bad, but only for, I don't know — ”

“Five minutes.” 

“More like ten.” 

“It varies. And of course it feels probably longer than it is. But then it’s gone — and there’s nothing. Then you wake up.” 

“What about Wolfsbane?” Lavender asked. 

“Overrated.” 

“And expensive.” 

“You won’t do a single bad thing to anyone,” said the woman who looked old, “you won’t hurt anyone, as long as you lock yourself up.” 

\--

She woke in the morning staring at the ceiling and the fluorescent light. “Lavender,” someone said, from a cell down the hall. 

“Here.” 

“Alright?” 

“Alright.” 

She stood, carefully, head spinning, aching, and dressed in her clothes, and by the time she had unlocked the complicated encryption on her cell and stumbled out someone had prepared for her a cup of coffee, and a bagel spread with cream cheese. 

\--

She scraped her Gringotts vault empty and bought a Muggle walkman, and two Lush tapes on cassette, and a train ticket north to Glasgow. She slept. In the toilet she looked at herself in the mirror. She needed her hair done. She wondered if her wolf was black. 

I’m a werewolf, she said to herself, I’m a werewolf. Me. A werewolf. 

She walked in the street in the irrepressible summer mist and went to the library. In the wizarding part of town she asked for jobs. She walked on the banks of the Clyde and smoked cigarettes and drank espresso and read _Wuthering Heights_. Once in a magic shop she ran into a few Ravenclaw students who had been two years below her at Hogwarts. No recognition passed across their faces. 

\--

She went to a club. She met a girl. They walked together on the banks of the Clyde at dawn skipping rocks on the still river. The girl was a squib from an old Scotch wizarding family. She too was eighteen and not long ago she had run away from home, but she would not say where home was. 

“I’m a werewolf,” said Lavender. “I just — last full moon was my first time.” 

“You never hear about folks being turned in their teens,” said the girl in her thick handsome brogue. “Anyway I’m sorry. I couldn’t tell if it means anything to you. I mean you never see — ” 

But she stopped there. You can say it, Lavender wanted to tell her. They went back to the girl’s flat and made pancakes, and they watched X-Files reruns on the telly, and eventually Lavender fell asleep on the couch. 

\--

There was a supervised transformation cell block in Glasgow and after presenting her Hogwarts diploma and sitting through two painful interviews in a skirt suit borrowed from the Scotch squib girl Lavender was hired by the local wizarding university’s Magical Creatures Research division to collect oral histories and interviews from the werewolves who visited the site on the full moons. They gave her some flowery and artsy reasoning she mostly ignored (she gleaned it was an attempt from wizarding establishment to gain part-humans’ trust again after the war), and they gave her a list of names and last registered addresses of werewolves she tracked down in foreclosed squats and shelters, and a Muggle typewriter on which to record her findings. The stipend she was paid was not enough for housing so she slept rough or on the squib girl’s couch (once or twice, in her bed; they were both drunk, I’ve never been, said the squib girl, hiccuped, been with a girl before, and Lavender said, nervous, well, have you masturbated… then in the morning they didn’t talk about it, until it happened again). 

She transformed in the cell block with her interview subjects. Others of them had been bit by Greyback but mostly in their young childhoods. “You’re a bit old for him,” said one, “aren’t you?” 

“It was in battle. I’m certain he didn’t care.” 

She didn’t talk about it much. She knew in speaking to them most of them had pledged allegiance to Greyback or the other Dark werewolf lords (of which apparently there were several), or even directly to Voldemort, so that they could live. Because they knew nothing else. Because, rightfully, she was beginning to see, they distrusted the Ministry, and the wizarding world at large, and they had been barred from Hogwarts, and they were starving, and they were possessed by fear. 

Some were seeking another Dark wizard to follow. They had heard rumors from the States. Pamphlets had been clandestinely distributed and Lavender kept copies in a notebook in her purse which she sometimes read while drunk and sentimental. Some also said that Greyback was still alive. 

\--

She couldn’t find a good hair braider in Glasgow and so in the squib girl’s bathroom while she was out at work she shaved her head. She tried the best she could to clean the sink but when the squib girl came back they fought and then for the first time sober they kissed, it was wet and kind of coffee tasting, and Lavender’s knees buckled a little, and the girl’s hand was very soft and gentle against-inside her hip at her belly so very near the scar, but when they pulled apart from each other she went to the couch where she had been sleeping and collected her things into her backpack. 

“Lav,” the girl was saying from the kitchen, she was crying, but so also was Lavender, “Lav, can you fucking hear me?” 

She hardly could. Her ears were ringing. The waxing moon in the window screamed across the floor. 

\--

Somehow Weasley had found out her work address and sent an owl. 

_Thinking of you, happy to hear you’ve found this job. Let us know if we can do anything to help you. I’m in the Auror Office now at the Ministry and there’s a new Chair of the Department of Part-Human Affairs, I met her just yesterday, she has a great ideas and she said —_

She was having a cigarette outside on the sidewalk whilst reading it, and she burned the letter from the crisp round ember. The breeze off the river was bright and cool. It was beginning to be autumn. 

\--

Feeling possessed she stopped by the record shop and bought a bunch of tapes, and then she took buses and hitchhiked and walked out of the city into the woods listening to her walkman. She had told the other researchers at the University that she was going to parlay with an encampment of homeless werewolves in Falkirk and as such to hold her paychecks. Instead she went north and then west mostly walking through the forest past the lochs upon the high featureless tarn. 

She listened to Pylon and Cocteau Twins and the Raincoats and Romeo Void. On the fourth day she ran out of cigarettes. On the sixth day she waited in a copse of woods for the moon to rise, shivering naked in the soft rain, and she remembered, _you won’t do a single bad thing as long as you lock yourself up…_

In the morning she woke, and there was blood smeared all over her chest and in her teeth as though she had taken part in some atavistic druid ceremony, and she puked a couple times in a woozy and abstract panic before she found the ragged shredded guts-spilling corpse of nothing worse than a rabbit. She cleaned herself with magic and dressed again and walked down off the hills into the lowlands, broke the ice rime from the first stream she found and rinsed her mouth out, stared up at the horizon breathing measuredly until her nausea settled. Until she stopped crying. 

\--

It became clear after not very long that she was following something, but she could not be certain yet what exactly it was. 

Such was life and all of it, she reasoned. Being dragged around like a chess piece or a marionette after not much more than a ghost of a feeling. 

\--

She took a room in Inverarnan at a seedy inn, because it was called the Wolf’s Jaw. She showered and watched shitty Muggle telly for a half hour and then she went downstairs to the bar and ordered a very dark almost blood-thick beer and sat in the shadowy corner absently scrubbing a hand over the bristles of her shaven head and listening. The jukebox played a seemingly ceaseless parade of shitty classic rock, and then it played “Sympathy for the Devil.” 

Her heart was beating and had been beating now for an hour or so almost such that it felt like there was something else wedged beside it in her chest. Some other heart — its heart, she reasoned, like a yearling she-wolf heart, which could be her own heart sometimes. 

Like her mother pounding on the door of her bedroom summer breaks. The door which she had locked so she could smoke weed or jerk off. The sunlight came in through the curtains upon the pale purplish wall. Lavender. Let me in. Let me in.

Whoever I was in those days I am not now, she thought. That girl died so this one could live. All that girl’s mortal trappings abandoned. Strewn across the tundra like the wreckage of ghostships. 

Even at the last of it her hair — like a shed disguise. 

_Pleased to meet you  
_ _hope you guessed my name._

There was sound outside, and then a shadow in the door. The thing — the other heart — stood and stilled like a watchful dog. She felt sharp. Whittled to a point. It had not been so very long but already she could pinpoint this feeling as its feeling. When it came to the surface of her like to peek out the window of her eyes. 

From the front pocket of her coat she took a cigarette, and she lit it. Behind him through the wedge of door spread the pale ectoplasmic light of the shrinking moon. 

**Author's Note:**

> [unofficial theme](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cgez1nZKGoM)
> 
> [me on tumblr](http://yeats-infection.tumblr.com/)


End file.
